Little mouse, you were so quick, so bright, so sweet, so full of life. And you still are everything you were then. None of it’s lost forever. All that promise, all that hope, that love and goodness—it’s still inside you. No one can take the gifts God gave you. Only you.

I know it's hard being a single mother baby, he said, but we're talking fundamentals here. Homemade cookies are one of the best parts of christmas. It's an absolute fundamental.

No degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity.

We wasn't born to be all the time scared, we was born happy.

I enjoy the hell out of writing but don't like what follows: promotion and publicity, which I always strive to keep to a minimum, sometimes to my publisher's dismay.

Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.

Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.